PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A bomb exploded in the back of a bus carrying government employees in northern Pakistan on Friday, killing 19 people and wounding dozens, officials said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but militants battling the government in northwestern Pakistan often target troops, officials and symbols of the state.

Friday's attack took place as the bus was traveling through the outskirts of the city of Peshawar, the provincial capital. It was carrying employees at the end of the work week back to their home city of Charsadda.

The explosion also wounded 46 people, said police officer Arif Khan.

Last year, at least 18 people were killed in the same neighborhood in a similar attack on a bus carrying government employees to Charsadda.

A school teacher Haroon Khan was critically wounded during that attack but recovered — only to die during Friday's blast, the officer said.

Pakistani television showed images of the bus with its tail end completely mangled.

One witness, who was not identified, told Pakistan's Geo Television channel that he was driving his car behind the bus when the blast ripped open the back end. He said people riding on the roof of the bus — a common sight in this country's overcrowded traffic — were thrown to the side.

One of the injured passengers speaking from his hospital bed said he was on his way to his village when the bomb went off.

"I was sitting in the bus, and all of us were chatting when suddenly a powerful blast shook us, and something hit me in the chest," said Mehboob Ali, 42, speaking from a hospital bed.

Militants in northern Pakistan who are trying to overthrow the government and establish a hard-line Islamic state have been waging war in the northwest against the military.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif came into office in June with a promise to open negotiations with the militants to end years of conflict.

But the talks seem to have gone nowhere so far, and the militants have continued with attacks such as the one on Friday.

Last Sunday, two suicide bombers attacked a church in Peshawar, killing dozens of Christians. Militants in northwestern Pakistan also killed a Pakistan Army general earlier in September.

Many in Pakistan support talks with the militants whom they see as fellow Muslims unfairly targeted by the military at the behest of the U.S. government. Washington has repeatedly urged the government to deal with militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan to the west.

University student Hazrat Bilal, 23, was wounded in Friday's the blast. He urged the government to hold peace talks with the militants.

"If the peace talks fail, then the government must take firm action against these militants," Bilal said.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists can now say with extreme confidence that human activity is the dominant cause of the global warming observed since the 1950s, a new report by an international scientific group said Friday.

Calling man-made warming "extremely likely," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used the strongest words yet on the issue as it adopted its assessment on the state of the climate system.

In its previous assessment, in 2007, the U.N.-sponsored panel said it was "very likely" that global warming was man-made.

One of the most controversial subjects in the report was how to deal with a purported slowdown in warming in the past 15 years. Climate skeptics say this "hiatus" casts doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.

Many governments had objections over how the issue was treated in earlier drafts and some had called for it to be deleted altogether.

In the end, the IPCC made only a brief mention of the issue in the summary for policymakers, stressing that short-term records are sensitive to natural variability and don't in general reflect long-term trends.

"An old rule says that climate-relevant trends should not be calculated for periods less than around 30 years," said Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the group that wrote the report.

Many scientists say the purported slowdown reflects random climate fluctuations and an unusually hot year, 1998, picked as a starting point for charting temperatures. Another leading hypothesis is that heat is settling temporarily in the oceans, but that wasn't included in the summary.

Stocker said there wasn't enough literature on "this emerging question."

The IPCC said the evidence of climate change has grown thanks to more and better observations, a clearer understanding of the climate system and improved models to analyze the impact of rising temperatures.

"Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased," said Qin Dahe, co-chair of the working group that wrote the report.

The full 2,000-page report isn't going to be released until Monday, but the summary for policymakers with the key findings was published Friday. It contained few surprises as many of the findings had been leaked in advance.

As expected, the IPCC raised its projections of the rise in sea levels to 10-32 inches (26-82 centimeters) by the end of the century. The previous report predicted a rise of 7-23 inches (18-59 centimeters).

But it also changed its estimate of how sensitive the climate is to an increase in CO2 concentrations, lowering the lower end of a range given in the previous report. In 2007, the IPCC said that a doubling of CO2 concentrations would likely result in 2-4.5 C (3.6-8.1 F) degrees of warming. This time it restored the lower end of that range to what it was in previous reports, 1.5 C (2.7 F).

The IPCC assessments are important because they form the scientific basis of U.N. negotiations on a new climate deal. Governments are supposed to finish that agreement in 2015, but it's unclear whether they will commit to the emissions cuts that scientists say will be necessary to keep the temperature below a limit at which the worst effects of climate change can be avoided.

Using four scenarios with different emissions controls, the report projected that global average temperatures would rise by 0.3 to 4.8 degrees C by the end of the century. That's 0.5-8.6 F.

Only the lowest scenario, which was based on major cuts in CO2 emissions and is considered unlikely, came in below the 2-degree C (3.6 F) limit that countries have set as their target in the climate talks to avoid the worst impacts of warming.

"This is yet another wakeup call: Those who deny the science or choose excuses over action are playing with fire," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. "Once again, the science grows clearer, the case grows more compelling, and the costs of inaction grow beyond anything that anyone with conscience or common sense should be willing to even contemplate."

At this point, emissions keep rising mainly due to rapid growth in China and other emerging economies. They say rich countries should take the lead on emissions cuts because they've pumped carbon into the atmosphere for longer.

Climate activists said the report should spur governments to action.

"There are few surprises in this report but the increase in the confidence around many observations just validates what we are seeing happening around us," said Samantha Smith, of the World Wildlife Fund.

The report adopted Friday deals with the physical science of climate change. Next year, the IPCC will adopt reports on the impacts of global warming, strategies to fight it and a synthesis of all three reports.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The inspectors responsible for tracking down Syria's chemical arms stockpile and verifying its destruction plan to start in Syria by Tuesday. They will face their tightest deadlines ever and work right in the heart of a war zone, according to a draft decision obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The decision is the key to any U.N. resolution on Syria's chemical weapons program.

The five permanent members of the deeply divided U.N. Security Council reached agreement Thursday on a resolution to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons. A vote depends on how soon the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is meeting later Friday at its headquarters in The Hague, can adopt its plan for securing and destroying Syria's stockpile.

U.N. diplomats say the Security Council hopes to meet Friday evening to vote on the resolution, but that depends on events in The Hague.

The draft agreed upon by Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain includes two legally binding demands — that Syria abandons its chemical stockpile and allows unfettered access to the chemical weapons experts.

If Syria fails to comply, the draft says the Security Council would need to adopt a second resolution to impose possible military and other actions on Damascus under Chapter Seven of the U.N. charter.

Issam Khalil, a member of Syrian President Bashar Assad's ruling Baath party, portrayed the deal as an American diplomatic failure.

"The resolution does not include threats or even possibilities of misinterpretations in a way that would let America and its allies to take advantage of it as they did in Iraq," Khalil said in Damascus.

Nonetheless, after 2 ½ years of paralysis, the agreement represents a breakthrough for the Security Council and rare unity between Russia, which supports Assad's government, and the United States, which backs the opposition.

The diplomatic push to find some agreement on Syria was triggered by an Aug. 21 poison gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians in a Damascus suburb and President Barack Obama's subsequent threat to use military force.

The U.S. and Russia agree that Syria has roughly 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons agents and precursors, including blister agents such as sulfur and mustard gas and nerve agents like sarin.

A group of U.N. inspectors already on the ground in Syria investigating the alleged use of chemical weapons said Friday they are probing a total of seven sites of suspected attacks, including the Damascus suburb where hundreds were killed last month. That number was raised from three sites.

Even as diplomatic headway was being made, Syria was still wracked by violence on Friday. Syrian activists said a car bomb near a mosque in a town north of Damascus killed at least 30 people.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the crisis, said the explosion struck as worshippers at the al-Sahel mosque in Rankous were leaving after Friday prayers.

The war that began in March 2011 has claimed more than 100,000 lives in Syria and has forced millions to flee the violence, according to the U.N.

The proposal being discussed Friday by the OPCW would allow inspectors into any site suspected of chemical weapons involvement even if Syria's government did not identify the location. That gives the inspectors unusually broad authority.

The draft calls for the organization's secretariat to start inspections "as soon as possible and no later than" Tuesday and sets a target of destroying all of Syria's chemical weapons and equipment by the first half of 2014.

It calls on Syria to "cooperate fully with all aspects of the implementation of this decision" and let the inspectors examine any location they choose.

Once the plan is approved, it gives Damascus a week to give detailed information on its arsenal, including the name and quantity of all chemicals in its stockpile; the type and quantity of munitions that can be used to fire chemical weapons and the location of weapons, storage facilities and production facilities. All chemical weapons production and mixing equipment should be destroyed no later than Nov. 1.

In an indication of the enormity of the task ahead, the OPCW also appealed for donations to fund the disarmament, saying it will have to hire new weapons inspectors and chemical experts.

The diplomatic turning point came when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Assad could avert U.S. military action by turning over "every single bit of his chemical weapons" to international control within a week. Russia quickly agreed.

Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov signed a deal on Sept. 13 to put Syria's chemical weapons under international control for later destruction. Assad's government accepted the deal and quickly signed up to Chemical Weapons Convention that is policed by the Hague-based OPCW.

Meanwhile, a group of international war crimes experts is calling for the creation of a war crimes court in Damascus to try top-ranking Syrian politicians and soldiers when the country's civil war ends.

Professor Michael Scharf of Case Western Reserve University told The Associated Press that draft statutes for such a court have been quietly under development for nearly two years.

Scharf said the group is going public now to push the issue of accountability for war crimes in Syria in hopes that will deter combatants from committing further atrocities.

Syria is not a party to the International Criminal Court — the permanent war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands — so the ICC does not have jurisdiction over war crimes there.

In Geneva, the U.N.'s top human rights body on Friday condemned what it called "systematic and widespread" rights violations by Syrian government forces.

The Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, voted 40-1 with six abstentions to approve a resolution condemning "continued gross, systematic and widespread violations of human rights ... by the Syrian authorities and affiliated militias" and "any human rights abuses" by opposition groups.

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Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Matthew Lee at the United Nations, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam and Albert Aji in Damascus contributed to this report.